Essay on Dream Deferred in Song of Solomon -- Song Solomon essays

The American imagine Deferred in Song of Solomon Beginning with the first African American literary works through the more recent successes much(prenominal) as Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon the topic of literacy is almost inextricably connected to emancipation and power. A closer investigation, however, leads the reader to an otherwise, less direct, message indicating that perhaps this flavour in literacy as a pathway to the American Dream of immunity and loving and financial success is contradictory or, at least, insufficient in social and cultural terms. In this way, African American literature reconstructs the American Dream into an even more complex dream deferred. Toni Morrison deconstructs the American Dream and the literacy myth in The Song of Solomon by deriding ceremonial education and literacy enchantment emphasizing oral family score. A most blatant ridicule of formal education comes to the reader in the story of First Corinthians Dead, the only personality i n the novel to attend college. First Corinthians finds that education made her a little too elegant (188), and that Bryn Mawr had done what a four-year dose of adult education was designed to do unfit her for eighty percent of the utilizable work of the world, (189). At forty-two, First Corinthians is untrained, unmarried and unfulfilled, thanks to her college education. Milkman, on the other hand, is not sent to college and is ultimately educated by the oral family history revealed by Pilate and the townspeople of Shalimar, Virginia. Milkmans freedom comes only after he breaks the bonds of the American Dream myth his father is slave to and seeks out his history, his culture, and his identity. Milkmans father, maconnais Dead II, is certain that... ...eedom, independence and equality built on the flourishing negotiation of not just illiteracy, but of a history of social and cultural denial. Such is the nature of the dream deferred. WORKS CITED Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern tiny Views Toni Morrison. spick-and-span York Chelsea House Publishing, 1990. Graff, Harvey J. The Literacy Myth Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City. refreshed York Academic Press, 1979. McKay, Nellie, editor, Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, G.K. Hall, 1988. Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York The Penguin Group, 1977. Sapphire. Push. New York time of origin Contemporaries, 1996. Peterson, Nancy J. Toni Morrison Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Baltimore Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Rice, Herbert William. Toni Morrison and the American Tradition A Rhetorical Reading. New York P. Lang, 1996.